[geeklog-users] Stripping my ampersands?

[geeklog-users-admin at lists.geeklog.net]

Well, after some work and help from people on this list (thank you), 
I've now worked out how to get rid of those ridiculous Microsoft 
"smart" quotes that appear as question marks when posted as a story. 
I've also dealt with the em and en dash issue. I've substituted the 
appropriate unicode codes (&#x1234) for the offending code. I've also 
modified a little perl script called demoronizer that automates the 
task to some extent.

The issue that I'm having is that when I paste the code into the story 
and hit either preview or save, everything looks great...except that if 
I go to edit again or save after viewing the preview, the question 
marks appear again. In other words, if I save it right away the 
appropriate unicode characters appear, but if I try to edit the story 
later, the unicode punctuation characters disappear and are replaced 
with the question mark indicating that the web browser doesn't know how 
to display the information.

Someone else previously alluded to the fact that they have to work 
around this by saving a separate file, making the appropriate changes 
there and then resubmitting the code into Geeklog. Are my ampersands 
getting stripped and thus the unicode is being deformed? Is there a way 
to fix this problem? I'm concerned that if some of the users of my site 
post a story by pasting from Word or some other Microsoft product that 
supports smart quotes, I'll not be able to edit the text correctly 
since all I'll see is question marks.

Thanks,

Norm
Norman Cohen
nacohen at mac.com